Choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra talks to Paul Arrowsmith ahead of the UK tour of Mariposa – “Adapting opera into non-verbal dance was an exciting, but certainly difficult.”
Nicknamed ‘the Pedro Almodovar of dance’, Carlos Pons Guerra is one of the UK’s leading voices in contemporary queer dance. His work explores gender, cultural and sexual identity. Guerra’s work often stems from his own experience and his desire to put LGBTQ+ narratives on the dance stage, staged in ways that evoke his Hispanic/Latin cultural heritage.
What is Mariposa?
Mariposa – ‘butterfly’ in Spanish – is my queer reimagining of Giacomo Puccini’s seminal opera, Madama Butterfly. An operatic dance drama, it transports Puccini’s orientalist libretto to post-revolution Cuba, to a dockland world of faded showgirls, hopeful rent boys, troubled sailors and divine queer spirits. Engulfed in a tropical storm of repressed desires, the production explores what we are ready to sacrifice in order to be loved and accepted.
I created Mariposa in 2021 to revisit the problematic gender and colonialist aspects of Madama Butterfly and ask how operas and narratives like this can remain relevant today.
What was your process for adapting opera as dance?
Adapting opera into non-verbal dance was an exciting, but certainly difficult, challenge! Luckily, I had Karthika Nair, our dramaturg, whose poetry and mind are beautiful and so poignant, to work with me. It felt like a process of translating and sifting, trying to distil the essence of the dynamics between the characters, and then translating them into a queer and Caribbean context.
Madama Butterfly has gorgeous music and beautiful lyrics, but if you analyse it closely, take out the music and the words, what you have is a very raw, and very real, story of love, hope and sacrifice, that needs no words to be told. So that was our focus in this adaptation, the raw emotion between the characters, the driving heartbreak of the story, the powerful tension between hope and repression. I think dance can express these things very well, almost more so than other art forms.
Many people find the themes of the opera problematic…
I’ve had a lifelong obsession with Butterfly, and while I still love the opera, we have become culturally more aware of its many problems. For example, the way that Cio-Cio San, the young Asian woman who is the protagonist, is objectified in the libretto’s text by the white male protagonists.
Madama Butterfly is also but one of the many examples of the opera canon (and actually, the ballet canon too!) where a woman sacrifices her life as a consequence of a man’s actions. From a queer perspective, it is another work where love happens only between men and women. With Mariposa, we tried to address these and other problematic aspects of the original, really trying to tell the story from the perspective of the underprivileged characters and offering alternatives to how love can be.
How did you approach the score?
We certainly went on a journey with Puccini’s score – and many recordings of Maria Callas as Butterfly!. In the early days of creation, we tried using an orchestral version, but some of the orientalist tropes that are present in the story are also quite audible in the score. I am originally from the Canary Islands, which share many cultural elements, amongst them music, with the Hispanic Caribbean.
Throughout the different stages of creation, I spent much time in the Dominican Republic, on research trips and working with dancers from the National Ballet and National Ballet School. So, our amazing composer, Luis Miguel Cobo, worked with many of the sounds that we gathered, the island dockland and seaside sounds of where I grew up, the rhythms and instruments of the Hispanic Caribbean, the boleros my dad, grandad and uncles used to sing, the voices, animals and street symphonies of Havana and Santo Domingo. All of that becomes a new score. Puccini is certainly there; as is Callas; sometimes they are more visible than others, and sometimes they are used metaphorically but not in the ways you’d expect to hear them.
You are touring Mariposa widely in the UK but how does it feel to be showing work on your home territory?
It feels extremely special to be taking Mariposa to my hometown of Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria. It’s been almost 20 years since I left to live in the UK, and this is the first time I’m sharing a full-length narrative for adults at home. I’ve been very fortunate to share my work in many places around the world, but home has always resisted me!
The opera house where we’re performing, on 15-16 November, The Pérez Galdós Theatre, is the place where I first saw opera, first saw Madama Butterfly, and where my grandmother Amalia would take me to see opera and zarzuela as a kid. And as a kid I always dreamed of being up there on that huge and beautiful stage. Now my work is going to be there, so it feels very emotional. There is a strong element in Mariposa about rebirth, transformation and hope. It feels very warm to see the hopes of the child version of me transformed into a production that will make it back to where it all started.
Funded by Arts Council England, the tour opens at The Dukes, Lancaster on 8 October 2024 with the London premiere at The Place on 25 February 2025. [Full listing below].
The cast includes Dan Baines (BalletBoyz) as Preston, the sailor, Holly Saw (Mathew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands) as Kate. Elle Taylor-Francis (Northern Ballet and Leipzig Ballet) and Jaivant Patel (Jaivant Patel Dance) will share the role of Madame Gertrudis, the brothel owner. Casting for the lead role, Mariposa, is to be announced.
Mariposa tour
Tuesday 8 October
The Dukes, Lancaster
Moor Lane, Lancaster LA1 1QE
Box office: 01524 598500 / https://dukeslancaster.org/
Tuesday 15 October
The Lighthouse, Poole
21 Kingland Rd, Poole BH15 1UG
Box office: 01202 280000 / https://www.lighthousepoole.co.uk/
Friday 22 & Saturday 23 November
MAST, Southampton
142, 144 Above Bar St, Southampton SO14 7DU
Box office: 023 8071 1811 / https://www.mayflower.org.uk/
Tuesday 26 November
Lakeside Arts, Nottingham
University Park, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham NG7 2RD
Box office: 0115 846 7777 / https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/externalrelations/lakeside-arts.aspx
Friday 14 February
Harrogate Theatre
6 Oxford St, Harrogate HG1 1QF
Box office: 01423 502116 / https://www.harrogatetheatre.co.uk/
Tuesday 25 & Wednesday 26 February
The Place, London
17 Duke’s Rd, London WC1H 9PY
Box office: 020 7121 1100 / https://theplace.org.uk/whats-on
Friday 14 & Saturday 15 March
Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre, Leeds
2 St Cecilia St, Leeds LS2 7PA
Box office: 0113 220 8008 / https://northernballet.com/venue/leeds-stanley-audrey-burton-theatre
Friday 21 March
Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton
Wulfruna St, Wolverhampton WV1 1SE
Box office: 01902 321321 / https://www.wlv.ac.uk/arena-theatre/
Paul Arrowsmith has been watching dance for 45 years after Peter Wright’s Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet was his baptism in dance in the UK. He wrote for Dancing Times between 2010-22, reporting from China, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark, along the way interviewing Alessandra Ferri, Akram Khan and Miyako Yoshida among many. He has a particular interest in design for dance and has profiled the work of Natalia Goncharova, Jürgen Rose, John Macfarlane and Anthony McDonald. Paul collaborated with Sir Peter Wright on his memoires Wrights & Wrongs and in 2016 was programme consultant for the BBC documentary, The Ballet Master: Sir Peter Wright at 90.